gowtham | 
09 28th, 2009| 
Looks like Google Street View is in the news again today, but for all the wrong reasons. A Swiss agency has threatened to sue Google because it hasn’t taken to proper privacy considerations into effect, saying that “many images are problematic and insufficiently anonymous.” A few weeks ago, the same Swiss organization asked Google, officially, but knock it off with the Street View, but Google offered to change it enough to placate the organization’s demands. The main issue has to do with when Street View shows private roads, or when someone’s car’s license plate is visible. Basically, it’s just trying to maintain some semblance of privacy. I don’t think this Swiss organization is against the idea of maps or anything, but when you’re able to make out someone’s face as he’s walking down the strasse, well, there’s no reason for that. What purpose does that serve?. Google, for its part, maintains that Street View is 100 percent legal in Switzerland, and will work to ensure its survival there. How many of you have actually used Street View for anything other than saying, “Oh, hey, we were kicked out of that bar once?” Maybe if you’re visiting New York for the first time, and want to see what the area around your hotel looks like?.
We’ve been reporting a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Possible features, screenshots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomorrow was promising to bring even more as yes, there’s an event partially dealing with Chrome OS scheduled to take place on Google’s Mountain View campus. But sadly, we’ve been banned from the event.Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.However, before they banned us and closed down registrations, we did manage to get the confirmation email about the event.The event, dubbed Front End Engineering Open House will feature “presentations on Google Maps and Chrome OS, YouTube will be unveiling their new look and showcasing YouTube 3-D”. While the presentation on Chrome OS is obviously the thing that first caught our eye, the “new look” for YouTube certainly sounds interesting. As does the showcase of YouTube 3D, something we covered a bit of this summer.
Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the Internet by storm the past week. According to Hitwise, Google News UK was the second biggest recipient of searches by UK-based Internet users for ‘patrick swayze’ and ‘kanye west’ (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for ‘katie price’ (9.29%) and fourth for ‘keith floyd’ (5.28%). As a result, visits to the regional news search engine increased a whopping 71% last week, with the site’s ranking reaching the one of 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week).In other words: last week was Google News UK’s busiest ever, and they have celebrities to thank for it.
Generally you can trust the ads on Google to at least be safe. But that’s not the case right now for the top ad being served on the query “Firefox.” The top ad says it is linking to “Firefox ® OfficiaI Sit?” at the URL www.mozilla.com/firefox/. And that is indeed the official Mozilla Firefox site. But the link actually goes to the much more sinister firefox.mozilla-now.com, a site that dishonestly tries to get users to pay up to $2.50/month for an ongoing subscription to “24/7 Expert Customer Support” (a screenshot of the landing page is below). The credit card provider is based in the Netherlands.Even advanced users who hover over the link won’t know what’s up before they click, due to Google’s ad redirect URL.Most savvy Internet users will know this is a con as soon as visiting the site, but a all those middle-America Yahoo users may not know any better, particularly since they were just told it was the Firefox official site. It just goes to show that not even the stuff Google publishes can always be completely trusted.
Privacy bugs at Facebook are nothing new, but that doesn’t make them any easier to stomach. Last week we caught wind of a new one that was relatively benign, but could have been a field day for mischief makers and spammers. Don’t worry, it didn’t give anyone access to your personal information — but it did let you post to the Wall of any Facebook Page you wanted, which can’t be welcome news to the major brands on Facebook, or politicians who go to great lengths to maintain a pristine public image. We spoke with Facebook about the problem last week and held this post until it issued a fix this evening.
This latest bug stemmed from Facebook’s impressive new iPhone app, which was released just over a week ago. The new app reproduces much of the functionality found on the Facebook homepage, including the ability to browse through News Feeds and Facebook Pages, and to post to these feeds. Unfortunately, the app failed to pay attention to some of the privacy settings involved with these actions.
On Facebook, Page administrators are given control over who can post to their walls — if you want to keep your page clean and display only your updates, you can block users from posting their comments. Alternatively, you can let users comment into an area that’s “Just for fans”, or you can show both fan comments and the Page’s updates in the same feed. Most brands use the first or second option, so that new visitors to their Pages only see content that they control by default (e.g. shared links and status updates).
The iPhone application ignored these settings, allowing you to post to a Page even if it was only supposed to be displaying posts from the Page Administrator. So, for example, you could visit President Obama’s Page, which understandably doesn’t allow for any comments, and write whatever you wanted to his feed. Granted, this wouldn’t get syndicated out to other users like his updates would, but anyone who visited Facebook.com/BarackObama would see your message nestled between President Obama’s shared links.
Following on the heels of President Obama’s speech to school children across the United States (in which he mentioned Google), Google has made a “back-to-school” announcement of its own. This fall, over five million students at “thousands of schools” in more than 145 countries will be using Google Apps’ Education offering, which represents a user increase of 400 percent from this time last year.Google is also launching a new centralized site targeted towards recruiting educational institutions. It includes tips on how to switch to Google Apps, the top ten reasons why to make the switch, discussion forums and more. And of course, the site is packed with testimonials from schools like Temple University, that attest to the popularity, cost-effectiveness and ease of use of Google Apps in the educational space. It comes as no surprise that Google is actively recruiting both student and educational institutions. This market is key because that’s where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Google also recently announced that its ambitious and potentially powerful email/IM hybrid, Google Wave, will be rolled out to schools first. Google recognizes that brand loyalty is definitely forged at these schools (look at Apple’s strategy), and is undoubtedly looking to capture share of these impressionable minds.
Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as seamless as a native iPhone application. Now they have that as well. Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.There has been no shortage of third-party applications that used Flickr’s pictures, but this app matches the look and feel of Flickr proper much more closely than any of them. Individual photo pages look great and commenting is easy. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easy way to send pictures to Twitter, except through the emailing method. The main page search functionality works well, and thumbnails are populated quickly. If you click on a photo, you can also go to a larger version loaded in a different screen that allows you to swipe left and right to move between images. It does not look like pinch to zoom works, however.
